Each year the Federal Aviation Administration records many accidents that result in millions of dollars in damage to aircraft and uncounted costs to airfield operations. These accidents are often caused by wildlife that wandered onto the flight line, manmade objects forgotten on the flight line, or other objects blown onto the flight line.
Traditional methods of detecting these hazards have been time consuming and prone to large margins of error as both false positives and complete misses resulting in airfield hazards. Historically, even in sophisticated operations, an air traffic controller (ATC) would monitor a low resolution radar system. Based on the output from the system, the ATC would make a judgment whether the radar had detected a hazard. Often the hazards would be misinterpreted or altogether missed. The ATC would frequently also stop time sensitive flight line operations to manually verify that the flight line was clear of all airfield hazards.
There are at least two problems with this system. First, the radar is not a very precise instrument for detecting hazards. The radar typically has a very low resolution. Secondly, even if the radar does identify an airfield hazard, because of human error and interpretation it may not be verified and corrected.
As such, a need currently exists for an improved method and device for detecting hazards to airfield operations.